Tag: drawing

Eiji gets the feeling he and Nanako are being followed. When Amane suggests it could be a cute girl stalking him, Nanako springs into action to “protect” him. Turns out Amane is half-right: it is a cute girl, but she’s not stalking Eiji. She’s been trying to return his student handbook, but could never find the right time to approach him.

Making matters trickier? Kino, like Nanako, is too shy to talk, but instead of senryu, she draws what she wants to say, like a live manga. The ensuing totally silent conversation between Kino and Nanako is a delight to behold, and Kino turns out to be quite the chatterbox (speaking abstractly). Her inner voice is provided by the immensely talented Kuno Misaki, making this a mini-reunion of Kawamoto sisters.

Because Kino makes it look so fun (not to mention easy due to her skills) the whole club has a drawing session, and we learn the sketching styles of Amane (everything is naked), Eiji (everyone looks sinister) and Nanako (everyone looks adorable).

When Eiji stares at Nanako to draw her she becomes bashful, but when she tells him she hardly has to look up from her sketchbook because she knows his face so well from seeing it every day, he gets bashful, much to Amane’s amusement!

The structure of the Irodoku finale is simple: Everyone says their goodbyes before Hitomi heads off back to her proper time. Shou (“I loved…your photos”), Chigusa (“Uhh…Smile more, I guess?”), Kurumi (“Don’t make me cry!”), Asagi (“I don’t care, I’m crying!”), and Kohaku (“See you in 60 years!”) each get their turn as the star sand matures, but when it’s time for Yuito, both he and Hitomi hesitate to say everything the want to say, despite the fact this may be the last time they see each other.

Turns out Hitomi, or rather Hitomi’s unconscious magic, isn’t going to be satisfied with their sedate, half-assed goodbyes. The magical device starts to malfunction, and Hitomi is swallowed up into another full-dive illusion. Only Yuito jumps into the stream and ends up in the same place. He rushes about looking and finally finds her, devoid of color, and they embrace.

They thank each other for having such profound effects on each other’s lives before confessing their love to each other, saying all the things left unsaid before. Yuito was all but done drawing before she showed up, and Hitomi couldn’t see colors. Both had shut themselves into dark, gray corners, but now the walls of those corners have shattered and given way to brilliant colors.

But as I predicted, love is the answer here. Saying she loves Yuito and hearing that he loves her back is enough to restore color to her world; this time, permanently. In the moments before she’s sent back to the future, she can see everyone and the town in color for the first time.

Kohaku privately remarks that it wasn’t her time magic that sent Hitomi back; it was Hitomi’s own unconscious magic simply wearing off. Shortly after Hitomi disappears, Kohaku gets a text from “Kohaku Level 77” in the year 2078: Hitomi has returned safe and sound.

Her life-changing journey thus at an end, Hitomi finds herself on the same hill where she left her granny, and they embrace tearfully. Kohaku (she insists Hitomi call her that rather than “Granny” since they became such good friends in the past) then presents Hitomi with a time capsule containing all the photos they took together.

It was probably already there, buried in the yard, before Hitomi left; Kohaku always knew she’d become a great enough mage to send Hitomi back. She’s just glad her action led to Hitomi finding happiness. Finally, she shows Kohaku the children’s book she read as a child—the only thing she saw in color. Turns out, it was written by Aoi Yuito.

After leaving flowers at her mother’s grave, Hitomi, brimming with the confidence her time in the past awakened, reconnects with her friends with school and starts an all-new Magic Photography Arts Club. As for where the 70ish-year-old Yuito and the others are…the show does not disclose that, nor does Hitomi seem in a hurry to seek them out.

That seems strange, since one would’ve thought Kohaku would have kept in touch with one if not all of them, and one would think that due to advances in technology people would live longer than they do in 2018. Alas, this finale wasn’t about Hitomi reconnecting with her friends from the past (other than Kohaku), nor her rather uninspiring romance with Yuito.

It was about Hitomi leaving that dark corner where she shut herself off, embracing all of the new colors in her world, and resuming her life in her time. She got what she needed in the past. Now it’s time to build a new happy future for herself.—MagicalChurlSukui

Yuito and Hitomi’s embrace late last week felt like a turning point in their romantic development—as scenes in which two sides of a couple run towards each other in the middle of the night tend to feel. But the aftermath of that embrace is tempered by two factors this week.

The first is the looming dread of Hitomi having to return to her time, despite not wanting to. The second, and possibly most unfortunate, is that as romantic pairings go, Hitomi and Yuito are just a bit dull. The flame of last week’s dramatic gesture was fizzled out rather quickly and anti-climactically, without so much of a hint of the ever-important confession.

But maybe that was the point. After all, what’s the point of confessing your love to someone you may never see again…though considering Kohaku is still around in the future there’s a good chance Yuito could be too—more on that later.

The club has a festival to execute, and despite her issues, Hitomi puts on a brave face and gives it her all. The result is some of her most impressive magic to date; Kokahu notes after the immensely successful first day that it’s the result of Hitomi’s training, not to mention being around people she wants to make happy with her magic, something she didn’t have in the future.

Back home, Kohaku’s folks have prepared a lavish feast to send Hitomi off, but some of their practical logistical talk initially harms the mood until they drop the subject and just let Kohaku enjoy her last night there, while preparing for her last day.

Festival-wise, the second day goes as well as the first; so well that Asagi, having made a mint off her bunny postcards, decides to kick Hitomi and Yuito out of the clubroom to explore the festival together, a sweet gesture on her part that shows how far she’s come.

Asagi later tells Shou people shouldn’t apologize for having liked someone (in his case Hitomi). She respects how Shou was able to put himself out there, and hopes one day she’ll have the courage to do the same. Naturally, she doesn’t specify whom she’d muster the courage to confess to, and even if she did, Shou still might not quite get it.

As for Hitomi and Yuito, they have fun running around the festival, culminating in a visit to what frankly seemed like a pretty lame haunted house—only one thing jumped out at them. Still, the darkness is an opportunity for the oh-so-timid couple to hold hands some more.

When they exit, Hitomi decides to cut their break short, perhaps satisfied with the moments they shared, but possibly also because she doesn’t want to get too deep into anything so close to ZHIEND.

During the festival wrap party, Kohaku and Hitomi join forces once more to create magical fireworks. While watching them burst in the sky, Hitomi describes how she feels, and Kohaku remarks that it sure sounds like it’s “happiness.” In that moment, Hitomi sees color in the fireworks—a huge improvement from when she saw them in black and white back in the future.

Unfortunately, the fireworks are the only thing she sees in color, and when they’re gone, her vision is back to monochrome. Perhaps there’s one thing she needs to do to make the colors permanent: tell Yuito how (I presume) she feels.

Whether she can do that in the past, or track him down in the future (when I imagine he’d recognize and remember her, as would the others), who can say. Maybe she’ll never confess openly at all, or maybe the magic ritual with the clock won’t work. However happily or bittersweetly it’s likely to end, I’m eager to see how this story resolves.

The club is putting the finishing touches on their photography, art, and magic exhibition (I love how the principal asks Kohaku to define “event”) as the day of the festival approaches, but the impending joy of sharing their gifts with classmates, friends and family is suddenly, jarringly preempted by a new and bizarre development: Hitomi is starting to experience “time gaps” as a result of the future Kohaku’s magic wearing off.

At first, Asagi thinks she was just mistaken in not noticing Hitomi in the room into which she’d just walked. But it only takes us one look from Kohaku to realize that something very wrong is occurring, and it can spiral out of control fast if not dealt with immediately. All of a sudden, all of the interpersonal problems that have occurred among the club so far pale in comparison to the very real threat of Hitomi permanently vanishing into oblivion.

Kohaku contacts a scholar and expert in time magic, as well as a fellow mage at a bookstore, to confirm her suspicions: whatever time magic she used sixty years in the future, it must be used again to return Hitomi to her proper place in the timeline, lest the universe excise her by force. For as much as she’s fit in and become comfortable, the fact is she is the kind of space-time abnormality the universe abhors.

There is no easy way to break this to Hitomi, and as a result of the suddenness and finality of the news (You gotta go, ASAP, The End) she’s just not sure how to process it, what to do or what to say. It’s sobering to know there doesn’t seem to be any time magic Kohaku of the present could perform on Hitomi to stabilize her presence in the past.

The next day’s weather reflects Kokahu and Hitomi’s moods, but the rain reminds Hitomi of the night Yuito offered her an umbrella, and she takes comfort in the belief it’s a memory she’ll always recall whenever it rains. Unfortunately, she also disappears right before Yuito’s eyes, and her umbrella depressingly falls to the ground.

When Yuito reports the incident to the others, Kohaku comes clean about the extent of the danger Hitomi’s in. She and Yuito find Hitomi where she vanished, sleeping in a bed of flowers in a disturbingly funereal scene that shakes Kohaku to the core. Back home, she sits vigil for her granddaughter, but her own grandmother tells her to get some rest herself. After all, Kohaku’s future self tacitly trusted her past self to pull off the time magic that will bring Hitomi back…but she won’t be able to do it if she’s exhausted.

Hitomi wakes up the next morning literally tied to Kohaku with a string, and ends up staying in for the day. Still, she gets up and leaves the house and ends up finding Kohaku on the beach with the others, gathering star sand for use in the spell that will return her to her time. A lot more sand than usual is washed up due to the typhoon that just blew by.

While no one is happy about the prospect of Hitomi having to go, and so soon (especially Asagi and Yuito), when Kohaku asks for help, they help, for Hitomi’s sake. They collect enough sand and she gets it to her acquaintance, who assures her they’ll have it ready to go by tomorrow.

Meanwhile, back at home, Hitomi finally finds a way to reach out to Yuito from across the town: a magical homing paper airplane, which taps on his window. He flashes his lights on and off, as does Hitomi. When her second airplane seems to go off course, she jumps into her shoes and chases after it.

Turns out it’s still en route to Yuito; he’s just not at home anymore: he’s racing towards her just as she’s racing towards him, and they meet in the middle, under the almost-new moon, and embrace. It took the urgency of impending oblivion for it to happen, but the two have finally come together and are on the same wavelength. It’s just too bad the time they’ll have after reaching this state looks to be all too painfully short…

As a result of Shou confessing to Hitomi, she and Asagi find themselves “at odds”, as he puts it (naturally he has no idea why, the big dolt). But neither of them want to keep not talking to each other. So Hitomi doesn’t give up trying to reach out to Asagi, and the two end up making up pretty quickly and easily once Asagi works through her frustrations as more her own fault that Hitomi’s.

After all, someone who’s known Shou as long as she has should know full well how direct and clear she has to be, and she hasn’t been, leading to him seeking love elsewhere. No matter how obvious it may seem to her that she’s in love with Shou, it’s ultimately up to her to make it known to him beyond doubt. Besties once more, Asagi and Hitomi scarf down some healing parfaits and then partake in therapeutic karaoke with Kurumi and Kohaku.

The next day, Kohaku announces the magical presentation which will be her contribution to the club for the festival. She intends, with Hitomi’s help, to transport visitors into a drawing; specifically, one of Yuito’s fantastical pastels. But Kohaku makes it clear to Hitomi she can’t do it without her. Hitomi has a special ability to reach into the heart of the artist (in this case Yuito’s), and has faith she’ll be able to do it. All it will take is dedication to the goal, discipline, and practice, practice, practice.

First she sends one paper airplane into a Seurat painting on the computer. Then two, then five, then one for every member of the club, in under three minutes. Kohaku may have asked a lot of Hitomi, but she knows how powerful Hitomi’s magic is, as well as how it’s been dormant much of her life. It’s time to let it out to stretch its legs, and once Hitomi gets it, it’s as invigorating for her as it is exciting for her granny.

Yuito completes his drawing—one with a theme park aesthetic that combines all of the club members’ disparate requests—and Hitomi and Kohaku successfully transport everyone inside. For the first time, Hitomi and her friends can see the same colors at the same time.

It’s a glorious sequence, diving into the drawing, and reminded me more and more of the similarly trippy What Dreams May Come, which starts out all vivid and lush and slowly grows more dark and menacing as its protagonist descends into the bowels of the hereafter.

Hitomi and Yuito are enjoying a lovely stroll in the forest when he spots his neon fish and follows it into a dark corner of the painting. Before long, he finds a stone statue of a seated, forlorn Hitomi, then gets shut into an even deeper darker chamber where he finds a young and even more forlorn Hitomi drawing sad monochromatic pictures of a princess and queen seemingly perpetually separated by a deep black boundary.

No matter how hard Yuito tries to cheer up this illusory ‘lil Hitomi, she rejects his attempts as unwanted and futile. Nothing can cross that black boundary. She doesn’t know why; she just knows you…just can’t. When Yuito snaps back into reality with everyone else outside the picture, Hitomi finds herself suddenly crying.

Clearly, just as Hitomi was able to reach into Yuito’s heart and bring his drawing to life for everyone to share in, Yuito’s drawing drew out a part of Hitomi. Now that he’s seen it, he’s not just going to pretend he didn’t.

She and Yuito go to their vantage point and talk through it. Yuito brings uncomfortable things up Hitomi would rather be left unsaid, right up until she’s shouting for him to stop already, but she realizes he’s trying to help and so she talks, for the first time, about how things were.

Hitomi’s mother was the first Tsukishiro woman in a long, long time who had no magical ability, but Hitomi had plenty. She believes her having magic is the reason her mother suddenly left, and blames and curses herself for not calling out to her. Yuito rightly assures her that Hitomi shouldn’t feel responsible just because she had magic and her mother didn’t, and rather than shoulder all the blame, it’s okay for her to be angry.

Hitomi’s guilt over the abilities she was born with led to her hatred of, and turning of her back on, magic. Until now, of course. Even without her mother around, she’s not alone. She has friends who care about her and are amazed and moved and made happier by the magical gifts Kohaku is helping her hone. And perhaps that’s why her grandmother sent her to the past to begin with: to show her that her magic is a blessing, not a burden.

When Kohaku arrived she looked so bright and confident I feared her light would completely envelop Hitomi. But instead of a bright sun blinding everything else in its vicinity, Kohaku proves to be a warm sun, embracing Hitomi just as her granny would…because she is her granny. She takes that role very seriously without pulling herself out of her own present.

Immediately, Kohaku attracts a lot of attention, especially when she “transports” her class to England by casting an illusion spell that puts the class into a photo. It would seem her penchant for causing mayhem at school rears its head when an illusory steam locomotive covers everyone with soot and smoke.

That night, at the ridiculously awesome Tsukishiro residence, Hitomi and Kohaku talk before bed, about how Hitomi not knowing precisely why she’s there or for how long, in other words not knowing what will come next, is exciting. She also shows Hitomi a photo of a train that was in the album she held; the magic train was her doing; she has magic power, it’s just hidden and dormant, only coming out under certain circumstances.

And for all the havoc she’s wreaked over the years, Kohaku maintains that magic should only be used to help people and to make them happy. She considers magic to be a gift from God, and its the duty of every mage given such a gift to give it back to the world through happiness.

The photography arts club is a happy bunch, with Chigusa and Kurumi slowly growing together (though Kurumi puts on a front of loathing and Chigusa pretends to be aloof). They go on the high school roof at night to take photos of the skyline.

Yuito tells Hitomi that seeing only in monochrome can have its advantages. She’s able to see or understand things color normally obscures for everyone else. The gang also learns that Hitomi is Kohaku’s granddaughter from sixty years into the future…and they’re perfectly fine with it (for the most part).

The two Tsukishiro mages cap off the night by transcribing Yuito’s tablet drawing of a train into the sky. They’re using magic to help their friends by making them happy. The next day while going over their shots, Kohaku officially joins the club and adds “magic” to its name, making it the “Magic Photography Arts Club.”

Rather than someone who was going to shove Hitomi out of relevance, Kohaku is a net positive to the group, strong and self-assured in every way Hitomi is not, but also warm, generous, and loving. Knowing Hitomi is from the future worries Yuito, because he doesn’t know if or when she’ll return there. I imagine such worries are premature; Hitomi still has a lot left to experience in the past.

Yuito’s words echo in Hitomi’s mind, as she now has a reason to explore her magic—so she can “someday” show it to him again, as he showed her his art. Each of them did something that made them vulnerable but came with the reward of growing just a little closer.

Still, the fact is Hitomi really isn’t that good at magic, even if she has the potential within her. To unlock it she’ll need to practice; her great-grandmother suggests she use a “wand” in the form of a Pocky to help focus while doing so. No harm in trying something new a little at a time.

She’ll also need practice finding a place at the school, which is practically fanatical about clubs. Both faculty and students insist she join one, but believes her achromatopsia precludes her from joining Yuito & Co’s photography arts club; conveniently forgetting the existence of black and white photography (though to be fair, she is from sixty years in the future).

When Yuito has her dive into the arts part of the club by painting a picture, her treatment of color all but confirms to him her inability to see them, at least as others do. Still, he’s quite sincere in his appraisal, and considering she’d “never drawn a picture” before, she did quite well!

From there she gets drawn more and more into the photo/arts club’s activities that day, from accompanying them as they recruit potential new members, to serving as a model during a dreamlike shoot at the pool.

While she fails to use the star sand that enables one to walk on water, she isn’t aware she picked the wrong color, and her own magic allows her to walk on it anyway…until one of the club members tells her she picked the wrong one, and she plunges into the drink.

Upon drying herself, Yuito comes to apologize, but she believes it just as much her fault for not refusing strongly enough (I don’t know, I thought she refused pretty dang strongly; they just ignored her!) Indeed, her tendency to so easily say there’s “no way” she can do something, or that she stay out of people’s way to make it “easier for everyone.”

Thankfully, she does decide that she can join the arts/photography club, and even helps them with their punishment of cleaning the pool into which they weren’t allowed to let anyone jump. Meanwhile, her grandmother Kohaku is almost home, and she seems to be someone who doesn’t just think, but knows she can do anything, and does it. In other words, she’s someone Hitomi could probably use in her life right now.

Hitomi wants to see Yuito’s vivid drawing again, but he’s preoccupied with the fact she broke into his room. Fair enough; it is a crime, not to mention a hassle for someone who clearly hates hassles. Hitomi has no choice but to tell the truth—it’s the magic’s fault—and hope he believes her.

Fortunately, he does, and accepts her apology without further trouble. Unfortunately, he scoots off before Hitomi can ask about his drawing. In the meantime, Hitomi isn’t sure what to do now that she’s in the futurepast, so her great-grandparents enroll her at Kohaku’s high school for the time being.

We only see a still image of Kohaku, but I found it exceedingly amusing that the mild-mannered granny of Hitomi’s time was such a wild child menace sixty years in the past, her presence is felt even in her absence, like some kind of Sauron-like supervillain!

Kohaku, with her frequent destructive exploits, has single-handedly given all mages a bad name, so it’s only natural that the students at school would be weary of Hitomi. If only they knew how much she can’t stand magic!

Well, they get a slight demonstration of that contempt when, in front of dozens of witnesses, among them her new acquaintances with the photography club, Hitomi proves she’s a mage by creating a very tiny, dim star that only sparkles for a moment.

And yet, even that poor showing represented the best Hitomi had probably done in months if not years. As a self-styled loather of magic, she never practiced, so whatever natural magical ability may dwell within her, she stinks at it because it’s like a totally unused, atrophied muscle.

Hitomi finds Yuito drawing on the rooftop after school, and offers an apology for causing such a stir. Yuito apologizes right back for forcing her to prove she was a mage when he could have simply trusted her word. Hitomi is surprised by his contriteness, but also uses it to ask to see his drawing one more time, as it’s something “special” to her.

This week I came to identify both Hitomi’s latent magic and Yuito’s private drawings as representing parts of themselves they’re loath to reveal to others, as if they were parts of their hearts or souls. Even though Yuito loves drawing while Hitomi hates magic, both of them would rather not show it to others…right up to the point they met each other.

Now, as one of Yuito’s friends observes later, Hitomi might not find magic to be that bad after all, as she’s practicing her star-making and has clearly already improved markedly from her previous attempt. In her case and in Yuito’s, all about who you show it to, and why.

I’m kinda glad Kohaku didn’t appear for at least one more week; I feel like her blowing in like a storm would have disrupted the delicate initial bonds forming between Hitomi and Yuito, not to mention even more adversely affect her first impression at school. We’ll see how the dynamic shifts when young Kohaku returns.

That term up top, modest magic, is used by the protagonist Tsukishiro Hitomi to describe her practice of repeating the same thing over and over in her head—in this case, that she’ll be fine alone—until it eventually comes true. It’s a spell, but a very simple one, and yet, it’s done all the time and it often works.

However, it doesn’t seem to be working too well for Hitomi; ever since her best friends in life left town, the color in the world has slowly drained from her sight. Even on a dazzling night of fireworks, she sees everything as a flat, even monochrome.

Classmates invite her to join the festivities, but Hitomi has promised to meet her grandmother Kohaku at a certain spot. There, Kohaku presents her with a device that will enable Hitomi to travel back in time. Why exactly she’s having Hitomi doing this (and why Hitomi doesn’t seem to have a say in the matter) are not explained.

But perhaps, like in Kiki’s Delivery Service, this is just the right time for a mage of Hitomi’s age to do what her granny is having her do; an initiation of sorts. The time travel is depicted as a ride aboard a bus driving through a glittering blue either of countless floating images.

Continuing the whimsical transition, after paying the strange magical creature that’s driving the bus a fare of cookie sticks (or something?) Hitomi alights and falls straight through the ground—which is made of clouds—and lands hard in the bedroom of some random guy (or is it random that she lands there?)

What doesn’t seem to be random is when she is. Her grandmother’s spell was aimed at sending her back to when she herself was in high school, which was about sixty years ago…in other words, our present year 2018. Once there, granny promised, Hitomi would eventually learn why she had to go, ostensibly by learning from her granny’s own high school-age self.

When the guy comes home and enters his room, Hitomi hides under the bed, and when he steps out, she escapes out the window (the mechanical latch for which briefly flummoxes the girl from the voice-activated future). While escaping, a classmate of the boy to which room belongs captures video footage, presuming the boy (whom she identifies as Aoi) was up to no good.

Once she escapes, it’s confirmed: Hitomi has traveled to the past. The glittering, skyscraper-packed skyline of her time has been seriously downsized. It looks a bit different, but it feels the same.

Those same classmates who saw her go out Aoi’s window spot her looking lost and confused, but don’t judge, and happily lead her to her destination: the town magic shop. Whatever the condition of the shop sixty years in the future, in 2018 it’s bustling, with folk young and old availing themselves of the wares.

Hitomi is disappointed to learn that Kohaku, her grandmother, is currently away on a trip to England, with no certain return date. But Kohaku’s grandmother—i.e., Hitomi’s great-great grandmother—is there, and believes both Hitomi’s letter and her story.

She sets Hitomi up in the spare room in the attic of the house, which Hitomi learns is practically brand-new in 2018. She remembers the house and the room as being much older of course, and a cozy, comforting place where she was once read bedtime stories.

There’s a coziness to the show at this point that pervades her interactions with her relatives. It may be a different time, but it’s the same family, and they’re just as warm and kind back then as they are in 2078.

The next morning, Hitomi sets off to initiate a search for her azurite earring. Turns out it’s already been found—by Aoi’s nosy mother, who heard rumors of a girl jumping out his son’s window. She’s not mad at Yuito (Aoi’s first name), but as a single mother would prefer her son’s girlfriend properly left out the front door. The thing is, Yuito has no idea what she’s talking about…and he’s not lying!

Yuito’s house is where Hitomi decides to start, but just as she approaches it he exits, and she decides to follow him instead. Keep in mind, her whole world remains stubbornly monochrome at this point…until she finds him sitting in a park, drawing on a tablet.

His drawing is the first thing in a long time she’s seen in color, and the shapes spill out and dance around, adding vivid color back to the entire world around her. It’s only temporary, however, and once she snaps out of it, Hitomi finds she was dancing and twirling in front of Yuito like a total weirdo, and he asks her who the heck she is.

Thus begins P.A. Works’ latest original series, which proves to be a different kind of modest magic, as many their works tend to be. Irozuku isn’t overly flashy (despite having literal fireworks in its opening moments), but rather so far is a quiet and delicate, yet rich and sumptuous affair. Animation, character design, and soundtrack are all top-notch; even KyoAni-esque.

Personally, the moment she saw color on the tablet caused goosebump-inducing. That was also the moment I was sold on this show. Its solid technical bona fides are there, but Hitomi herself isn’t as immediately charming as, say, Shirahane Yukina (though Ishihara Kaori has the chops to remedy that). In any case, I’m definitely going forward with this.

The blood from the beating of Mitsuboshi by two sociopath guys dredges up unpleasant memories for Shio: those of her mother saying she’ll never forgive her for letting go of her hand. Uh, that’s really unreasonable, Shio’s Mom! Why is everyone in this show have to be so goddamn INSANE smh.

Satou rolls the dice and manages to take out both of the guys with taser (which thankfully didn’t die on her; anime tasers are very fickle) and a knife (gouging out the eyes of one). She scoops up the unconscious Shio and whisks her home to her suddenly very insecure feeling “castle.”

It’s clear Shio had problems well before Satou met her, but Satou has similar traumatic memories of interacting with an adult guardian who was not okay in the head. In this case, Satou’s aunt, who was always covered in bruises and bandages, explaining them away to her niece as “another kind of love.” Yeaaah, notsomuch. Control is not love.

The next morning things seem to be back to normal, but the previous night Satou saw fit to install exterior locks to keep her Happy Sugar Girl “safe” (i.e. under control). Words of trust are no longer sufficient, not after last night, the outcome of which Satou is at least lucid enough to know was extremely lucky.

This is a show where it’s almost never good when two people are together (except I guess for Satou and Shio), but things aren’t much better when anyone is alone: Satou’s teacher is suspicious that her aunt isn’t answering the phone, but also just wants Satou to insult and punish him more.

Mitsuboshi witnessed Satou making off with Shio, posters of whom he’s plastered all over his room, because now he’s a demented lolicon who has become fixated on the girl be belives to be his “angel” and salvation. Even Shio has her private secret: scrawling a crude drawing in the closet while in a trance and chanting “spinning.” 2018, AMIRITE?

Shio snaps out of it when Satou comes home early, which is because her cafe staff was sent home early due to the violent attacks in the vicinity. Still, Satou needs to keep working so she can keep saving to buy (hopefully not rent) a stronger “castle” in which to preserve her HSL. While she only speaks of an expensive dream to her co-workers, her brown-haired kohai is impressed by her dedication.

That night, after giving up on cleaning the blood off the wall of the murder room (maybe she needs to call The Wolf), Satou gazes at her account balance on her phone, which I may henceforth call Chekhov’s Account Balance on her phone, since, at some point, those savings could either be spent or vanished via some foul play. In any case, Satou doesn’t really love Shio; she just wants something all hers that she can control.

Meanwhile, the drawing of Chio’s mother lurks menacingly in the closet—another stain Satou can’t remove—while at the closed cafe the brown-haired kohai breaks into Satou’s locker and smells her clothes with alarming gusto. What can you say—she’s a psycho magnet.

As Asirpa prepares traps to ensnare delicious nut-fed squirrels for dinner, Sugimoto determines the prisoners will avoid small villages where they’d stand out. The pair head into the booming port and commercial city of Otaru to canvass the places where they’d expose their tattooed skin: the baths and the brothels.

While questioning sex workers, the tiny Asirpa gets nabbed by the brothel owner, but quickly demonstrates she’s not worth his trouble, considering her skill with a knife handle and the “immortal” company she keeps.

Ultimately, they manage to snag their first prisoner the same way they catch squirrels: with a snare that traps him by the neck. Asirpa is adamant that they’ll kill nobody needlessly, and instead uses the pencil and paper acquired in Otaru to draw their captive’s tattoos. Fun little human moments like Asirpa drooling over squirrel meat or her shock at Sugimoto’s “rubber pencil” trick are effective at keeping the mood from getting too heavy.

This prisoner escaped from the others when they suddenly started killing each other, not realizing that absent drafting skills (or pencils), completing the map meant quite a bit of skinning. However, before this prisoner can give them any more information, he’s shot right through the brain, darkening the mood anew.

Sugimoto tracks down the gunman and identifies him not just as a fellow soldier, but one of the much-feared and respected Hokkaido 7th Division, known as the Guardians of the North for their tenacity in even the toughest battles. In other words, a division Sugimoto would be right at home in, had he not been dishonorably separated from the army.

The two share a couple moments as fellow soldiers to prepare for battle, and when the soldier asks if Sugimoto is tracking down the prisoners for money, he corrects him by saying it’s for love…which isn’t far off. After all, the money is for the family of the friend he loved, not for himself.

This time, Sugimoto’s foe is too tough to go easy on, and when the choice becomes letting him go to inform his superiors and stopping him, Sugimoto tosses the butt of his rifle at the guy, hitting him in the head and sending him tumbling off a cliff and into the freezing river, where he and Asirpa presume he’s dead but rather sloppily refrain from confirming it.

That error could be a result of hunger, but “We’re alive, so of course we get hungry” Asirpa has the solution for that when they return to her hunting tent, which is also her kitchen, There, she skins the squirrels they caught and lets Sugimoto eat the brain of one raw, which is supposedly the best part.

She finely minces the remaining meat and bones into chitatap, a kind of dish that sounds like the way you make it (incidentally, one should say “chitatap” while chopping the meat). In a concession to Sugimoto’s Sisam tastes, she forms balls with the meat and cooks them in broth for a sumptuous meal, and uses the Ainu saying “Hinna, hinna!” instead of “Itadakimasu!” to give thanks.

There’s no such thing as eating too much out here in The Grey, so after nabbing and sketching their second prisoner in as many days, Asirpa gets a bead on a rabbit and pounces on it. Unfortunately, this prisoner is an escape artists who coughs up a razor with which to cut himself free.

While chasing him down, he and Sugimoto end up tumbling down a cliff and falling into the drink, which is a death sentence for those who don’t get their freezing clothes off and warm up in front of a fire within ten minutes.

There’s a black comedy of errors as the prisoner succumbs to the various symptoms of hypothermia, but once he gets Sugimoto’s assurances he’ll spare his life, he coughs up a bullet they can use to spark a life-saving fire.

Having survived their dance with death, the two bond, casting aside their conflict, and the prisoner, Shiraishi, shares more intel with Sugimoto, including the fact that the leader of the prisoners is a grizzled and immensely-skilled samurai veteran from a war fought thirty years prior.

Meanwhile, the 7th division private also survived his hypothermia (perhaps Sugimoto’s immortaliy rubs off on people) and soon wakes up, meaning his commanding officer, who himself seems to have survived having a large part of his face peeled off. As tough and resourceful as Sugimoto and Asirpa are, the characters they’ll have to deal with to achieve their goal are no slouches!

Golden Kamuy has established itself as one of the best best of the Spring, despite taking place in a bitterer Winter than the one we’re still struggling to escape in real life. So far it’s sported some great characters of almost mythical ability, offered some creative combat and survival skills, integrating elements of Ainu culture wherever possible. The OP and ED are also tight as hell. More than anything, Golden Kamuy has attitude, but isn’t so serious it won’t crack jokes where appropriate.